Teacher Advocacy: Keeping the Canary Alive
Where’s the outrage? That question was posed by the Oregonian Editorial Board June 29th. I’ve been mulling that one around in my head for awhile so it was nice to see it make headlines. Oregon’s budget...
View ArticleA Tale of Three Schools: High Poverty and Inequality
Due to budget cuts and low seniority, I have had the privilege (or curse) of teaching at three different schools in the past two years. All three schools are in the same district, but each is vastly...
View Article“Waiting for Superman” or How to Find Our Way Back to Children
Waiting for Superman is a powerful reminder that children and parents care about their own education. By choosing to focus on several children and their families, the director Davis Guggenheim...
View ArticleThe Other Side of the Tenure Debate: How Experience and Security Can Foster...
A lot has been said recently about doing away with the tenure system which is said to unfairly protect sub-par teachers. So what then are the benefits of the tenure system? There must be some reason...
View ArticleGrassroots Educational Reform: The Teachers’ Conference
Teaching is a lonely profession. At some point in their career, everyone bemoans the fact that teaching, planning, grading, attending meetings, and tending to bureaucratic necessities leaves little...
View ArticleTo Oregon’s School Districts: What’s the Plan for Dealing With Budget Cuts?
Even though I’m not teaching this year, I often miss having students. I miss the personal connections with kids and their parents; I miss having my own classroom, a safe space for learning and...
View ArticleSenator: A Promise for a Promise
Originally published in the Oregonian, as “How about some straight talk about fiscal crisis?” This past election I received 146 political mailings. They contained hundreds of promises, including vows...
View ArticleA Recipe for Success: The Ideal Qualities of a Principal
A great school has at its core, I believe, a strong leader. Great schools, like winning teams, have leaders with coordinated plans of action, intimate knowledge of the skills of players and a...
View Article“A terrible thing to waste…”
My class of teacher candidates and I are reading Teaching 2030, a book that uses wonderful ideas from practicing teachers to discuss their changing roles. As the title suggests, the authors (Barnett...
View ArticleThe Upside of Teaching at a Low SES School
Jennifer Singleton is an elementary school music teacher with seven years of teaching experience in Portland metro area schools. She was born, raised, and educated in Oregon, and loves nothing more...
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